All quotes below are from "Peter Cole: the Enduring Legend," by Oz Godson, which ran in the Spring 1993 issue of Surfer's Journal. Cole was 62 when Godson interviewed him.


“Kit Horn and Buzzy Trent were a year ahead of us in school and had started surfing with Matt Kivlin in 1941, at Sorrento Beach in Santa Monica. The following year they began riding Malibu, so they got to be very good surfers. Corny [Peter's twin brother] and I, meanwhile, were still bodysurfing in Santa Monica. Anyway, the hang-out place the Malibu crew was our house or Buzzy’s house, because our moms would lavish us with desserts and cookies.

One day at Sorrento, we decided to form a surf club. Chuck King was a lifeguard there and had been helping us get started surfing. We told him that we wanted to form a club and he helped us out by giving us a name—the Kukai Surf Club, which he said meant Gods of the Ocean. We thought that was a great name, and Matt and Corny started painting the club title on our army fatigue shirts. People would ask us what "Kukai" meant and we'd puff out our chests and say, “Gods of the Ocean!” Some would go away laughing. Well, we finally found out what Kukai meant ["shit" in Hawaiian] and that was the end of the club. 


Matt was one of the younger group of surfers at Malibu who everybody looked up to. He was a performance surfer, very graceful and fluid. Matt and Joe Quigg were probably the top surfers on the coast. They were the first to build a light, chip style board along with Bob Simmons. Matt would really stand out on a wave and a lot of the surfers tried to surf like him. When Mickey Dora started surfing Malibu in the late '40s, Kivlin was his idol, and so Mickey's stance and the way he surfed was a lot like Matt’s. I’ve always thought that Matt's style influenced Phil Edwards as well. Being a little older


Buzzy was our protector. He was a superb athlete, all CIF football player. He could run the 100 in 10-flat! Buzzy was one of the first to come to Hawaii to surf big waves. Of course, the Hawaiian surfers had been riding big surf for years, George Downing, Wally Froiseth, Max Lim, Rabbit Kekai, Woody Brown and Richard Kao— the older group. The younger guys were Kimo Hollinger, Paul Gebauer, Joey Cabell and Paul Strauch. Anyway, Buzzy and the Hoffman brothers, Walter and Flippy, came over and started surfing Makaha with the Hawaiians. 


Kit was the same age as Buzzy and was also a protector of the younger members of the Kukai Surf Club. He was also a great athlete. Kit was probably more instrumental in getting Corny and I into surfing than Buzzy. Kit was a real good-looking guy, I always thought he looked like Flash Gordon (Buster Crabb), and had girls flocking around. But he always had time to help when it came to showing us I how to surf. Kit is still active in surfing and goes up to Point Arena to get some big waves. 


Bob was our guru, we followed him around and sometimes he would take us with him on expeditions up and down the coast. Simmons, along with Quigg and Kivlin, started experimenting with lighter balsa-fiberglass boards in the mid- and late '40s. The boards they made revolutionized surfing. I think Simmons he was the first one to cover a board with fiberglass. He was way ahead of his time on thinking about things like elliptical rails, putting the widest part of the board up to the nose, scooping the board, kicking the nose and using concave bottoms. My first board was a Simmons. In 1948 I got one of his Simmons balsa-fiberglass boards, a concave—it was a really good board, and I rode it until 1958 when it broke on the rocks at Steamer Lane.

Simmons was obsessed with big waves and was always going to places like Ventura Overhead and Tijuana Sloughs, looking for bigger surf. He charted the reefs on the North Shore, and when he came to the Islands it was specifically to go there. The Hawaiians surfed the North Shore but not regularly. Bob and Flippy Hoffman stayed at Sunset, they got a place on the point and were the first to go out there day after day, as a regular thing. Most of the big-wave action was at Makaha at that time, but Simmons didn’t like the scene there.


While Simmons was making boards that planed really well and went fast, Joe started doing boards for performance. Quigg's boards would turn and maneuver really well. He made a board for Les Williams that was way ahead of its time. Williams was taking off and turning in a way that was just so far ahead of anything that anyone else was doing at the time. 

The problem with all these guys, the boardmakers, was that it took such a long time to get your board. All the works was done in garages and little one-room rentals, and when the surf was up all work would stop. Simmons had a place on 17th and Olympic in Santa Monica, in a rough part of town, and after you ordered the board you had to go over there and pester him every week or nothing got done. Sometimes it took a year to get a board. Dale Velzy and Hobie Alter were the first ones to produce boards in a high enough volume to make it commercially viable to open a surf shop.


I got a bunch of friends from Stanford interested in surfing [Cole received a degree in Fine Arts from Stanford in 1953], and we'd drive down to Santa Cruz and surf Steamer Lane and Pleasure Point. The first time I surfed there was October 1949, with Kit Horn. We started out surfing Cowell's, then paddled up to Steamer Lane and rode there all day by ourselves until Ted Pearson came out and joined us. Ted said it was not commonly surfed. It was easy to see why, because if you fell, you had a long swim and your board would get totaled on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. It forced us to be ultra-conservative.

I got my best California wave ever on January 10th, 1953, at Steamers. I caught the wave from the outside lineup at the Lane outside all the way to Cowell's, halfway to the pier. I don’t know how big Steamers was, but I was dropping into reforms as I rode that were close to 15 feet at the regular lineup then going into a long wall through Cowell's. This same swell was that day surfed by Matt, Joe Quigg and Ricky Grigg at Rincon, and it's been talked about ever since.

Santa Cruz was the best preparation for Ricky and myself to jump over to the North Shore. Fred Van Dyke, who moved to Hawaii in '58, three years before us, agrees the Steamer Lane is similar to Sunset in terms of having to deal with  a shifting peak and a lot of current. Northern California surfers have always adjusted to the North Shore quickly. So did the La Jolla gang.


Ricky [Grigg] and I have always liked Sunset best because of its shifting peak. I like it more when the swell comes out of the north-northwest; Ricky likes it out of the west.


Waimea is a fairly easy place to ride compared to Sunset, in terms of lining up, but it has a very steep drop. The biggest wave I've ever ridden was at Waimea in October 1969. The last time I rode there was Halloween 1988, right after my 58th birthday. Now at Waimea, I don’t get too aggressive. The crowd sort of psyches me out. I was as aggressive as I’ve been in a long time the other day, though. Of course, it was relatively small, mellow, maybe 15-18'. Thinking back to the way I rode Waimea in my prime, all aggressive and charging into waves. Now I don’t have that approach. At Waimea, anyway. At Sunset I don’t feel any different than I did when I was younger. Sunset is mellower. It doesn’t have the awesomeness that you get at Waimea. In the last 10 years I’ve been surfing some large Makaha Point surf. That's probably where I’ve gotten my biggest waves over the last ten years.


He was the best. He had style and patience. Pat would sit and wait, and when a real good wave would come, he'd be the only one in the right place. 


Ricky and I knew from the first day we surfed Sunset that we would be riding there for many, many years. It was so much fun. And we're still out there. To do it, we had to make sacrifices. We had to design our lives to make it happen. We both went to school and got a good education so that we could select professions that would be rewarding and interesting while allowing us to live on the North Shore where we have the best surf. So we never just surfed. We always had commitments, deadlines, schedules. I have never had an extended time, more than two weeks, where all I did was surf. Those of our generation who dedicated all their time and energy to surfing are not in the lineup anymore. To surf into old age, it is important that surfing be nothing more than a recreational activity. It should never be a person’s entire life. 


Neither Ricky nor I are religious about exercise. Ricky made the comment once that surfing itself is the best exercise for surfers. Surfing will take care of your body for you. I summer, when the waves are small, I'll just jump into the ocean and swim up to Kammies and back, about a half mile. I have a 9'7" tanker that I ride at Kammies with my boys, Peter and Douglas. We get a lot of windswell there in the summer when the rest of the North Shore is flat. I also do some stretching exercises in my bedroom and sit-ups. We used to do a lot of free-diving, and that was really helpful. Ricky, Buzzy, Jose and Pat could all free dive 100' if they had to. When a guy can free-dive that far down, a wipeout is nothing. When you wipeout you’re only under water maybe 25 seconds or so. You’re down for 90 seconds on a just a 60' free-dive. So what’s a wipeout to someone who can do that? 

What's more important than exercise, for me, is keeping the weight under control. If I can keep my weight down, I can go out there and feel good. When you get on that board and you’re heavy, you’re a slug. Ricky agrees with me on that totally. You just feel better and are more limber when you're at the correct weight.


Where Ricky and I disagree is on wearing a leash. Ricky won’t go out without one. I have never used one. I contend that using a leash can be dangerous in big surf. You also don’t get the benefit of swimming and bodysurfing when you use one. After losing my board, I like to try and bodysurf in as fast as I can. It’s fun and it’s good exercise.


I’m getting a new board for Waimea. It’s 11'6", and I’m hoping I can ride Waimea for a few more years, maybe until I’m 65. And I’m hoping to ride Sunset for a long time, like into my late 70s.

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